Our Mantle

  We have a fireplace in our home...not that we can actually light fires, but we have one.  There is something wrong with the chimney.  Above the fireplace is a lovely wooden mantle.

  I said in a previous post that our home is not a decorator's delight, far from it.  This mantle of ours would be a great place for pictures, or a few choice knick knacks.  But reality is, the mantle is high up and horizontal and that means it collects STUFF!

  Here are a few pictures from the past few weeks of our mantle.

Let's see...we've got 2 boxes of shoes that need returned, a globe, some clothing, a radio controlled car, and a birthday sign. My laptop is on the far right side in its accustomed place, as I don't want little people messing with my laptop!

Well, that's a bit better. The clothes are gone, as is the radio controlled car.  But those shoes are still there...

  Sigh, more stuff now.  Papers, a Smash Boppit game, and those tedious shoes are still there!

And now the shoes are joined by some pants that need returned as well.

So what's my point?

 My point is this...while my mantle is NEVER what I want it to be, I keep plugging away at it.  I would like it to just be decorative, but at this point in life -- it won't be.  We need the tall, horizontal surface to store items.  BUT, I keep moving things off of it when I can, and while there is plenty of clutter, the piles aren't climbing higher and higher.

 I have a perfectionistic streak, and one of my biggest accomplishments in life was to accept that better is better.  No, my home is never as clean, tidy, and uncluttered as I would like.  But there IS value in consistently working away on trouble areas.  I rarely have time to spend hours cleaning, but if I take 10 minutes here, 15 there, our home will stay at least habitable.